Pages

Saturday, August 02, 2014

Bank Job: Part 2

Miriam Kowles is crying. Right now it’s
all she’s good for. I don’t like the thought, but it’s mine.
Ten minutes ago, the town of Raven’s Bluff boasted over two
thousand people in it. Before a banker banished the entire place
Outside the universe befeft of words and protections just to make a
statement. I don’t have profanity strong enough for what I
feel about Steve Dowell right now. I remind myself that banks –
even the Bank – have done far worse than this over the centuries. I
remind myself that I am far outside the universe and there are limits
to what a magician can do in this situation.

I pretend all that helps. Everyone else
is dead. Most of them died in the first two minutes as I was trying
to figure out how to draw up and shape energies in this place. In the
universe, magic is about will and need and desire; here is it is a
wild dance, a shaping of chaos to fling it into foes and friends
alike. Mirium stumbled alive into the bank despite the late hour on
earth; she’d been doing a night deposit when I came out, I managed
to ward her.

That was it. I warded her, and by the
time I got the ward to hold together everyone else was dead. If they
were lucky. The town is floating in an ocean of white noise, what
we’d call sky alien shapes bleeding overhead. Entities are moving
through what had been the town. Miriam is seeing flashes of yellow
and black; I’m a magician. We learn to see what is really present,
and that is not always wise. The creatures are thin, existing in two
dimensions alone, metal-blade bones ripping apart buildings and
people as they move in directions and shapes I don’t have words
for.

“Miriam.” I thread power into my
voice, but it doesn’t touch her fear. She’s whispering, “Oh,
God, Oh, God,” over and over, but the pitches are different. Not a
broken record. Something slices half the bank apart behind us; I push
her out into the road, wrap my arms around her. “Miriam, listen to
me. We can get home. Think of home. Think of Earth. Make your dreams
a way.”

“Dead. They’re dead.” She twists
her head up to stare at me. “Why aren’t we dead?!” I say
nothing, and she lunges at the silence. “This is your fault, isn’t
it?”

“You may call it that. It was not my
intent,” I say, and my voice is distant even to my ears. She tries
to slap me; I catch her hand. “I am a magician, Miriam Kowles, but
I have neither capacity nor desire to see the shape of all things
before I act. It did not occur to me that the Bank would sacrifice an
entire town just to make a statement to the rest of the world about
me. Perhaps I have been looking for monsters in the wrong place for
some time now.”

She tries to hit me again, not hearing
my words at all. Or perhaps hearing them too clearly. I move back,
and she falls to the ground with a wail of pain that calls something
in this place, summons it through wards and protections. Like to
like, feeder to food, predator to prey. Miriam’s body jerks to its
feet as something alien stares out of it at me, bones and flesh
twisting wildly as they try to accommodate another presence inside
them.

I should be angry. I should be furious.
I am far past such things now, but the numbness still hurts. I am not
a monster. The people who caused this to happen are. Repetition is
power; say it enough, and one might almost believe it to be truth.

I pull on the nature of this place, on
what is being done here, and unmake the body and whatever is inside
it. I’m me enough for that. I don’t know how much more. I take a
breath, another. Short, sharp, and reach through the bindings that
tie me to Jay. He’s from far Outside the universe, bound into my
service and sitting in a car back on Earth playing games on his
phone. I reach for him, and get raw fear, almost enough to overwhelm
the bindings that hold us together.

He’s too terrified to come Outside.
Even for me. And he has no idea how to cope with that, with what I
need, and that his fear is bigger than anything he can do to help us.
But it gives me a direction. I crouch, as things move beyond my own
wards, beyond my nature. A magician binds and banishes, and they know
this without knowing it. I don’t know how long it will keep them
away, but I doubt it will be long enough.

Here is a truth: it is harder to cut
yourself open than one might suppose. I slice rock along my hand four
times before I have will enough to cur through skin, let the blood
strike earth. Magic so old it isn’t even magic anymore. Blood to
blood, sky to earth, the tilling of ancient fields. Raven’s Bluff
was built by people and desires to be home as much as I do. I grab
that, find the last shreds of the banishing the Bank made through
Dowell’s will.

I unmade Miaram’s body.

I use the knowledge to half-umake the
banishing, reversing it. To walk back to the universe alone is
tiring, though not hard if one knows of a Way. To do it with an
entire town is probably not possible. I do it anyway, shoving prices
aside to pay them later. The Bank will balance the books on this,
that much I am determined to see happen.

There is darkness, and more shades of
grey than there are of black of white, until even grey bleeds from
the world. There is me, and the town, and the faint sound of ravens
helping to pull it back into the world, Jay’s terror a beacon I use
with ruthless efficiency. It takes time and pain, but time is
something I have and pain is only temporary. The sky is a sky,
between one moment and the next, as if I sneezed and everything was
real after.

I walk. I stand, and I walk out of
Raven’s Bluff, and if the Bank had any other traps planned, nothing
goes off. I am not sure they would dare to.

Jay is in the back of the car when I
arrive, sucking frantically on his right thumb in terror, pale eyes
wide and desperate as he flings himself into me with keening,
blubbering words I barely catch.

I push him away, perhaps harder than I
need to. “We need to get away from here. Somewhere else. Rest.” I
say rest instead of hide, because pride demands it. “You drive,”
I whisper, and crawl into the back and it takes too much to bind away
the pain but somehow I sleep anyway in the end. I don’t dream.
Somehow, I don’t dream. Somehow a ten year old kid drives the car
to a hotel.

The hotel room smells of fresh sheets,
subway melts and fear. I’m lying in a voluminous bed, Jay pacing
beside it with a nest of clothing he must have been sleeping in
beside him. I feel sore, but alive. Awake. He’s sucking on his
thumb still, frantically desperate as he paces.

“Jay?”

“Honcho?” He spins, but doesn’t
move closer, body vibrating.

“This is a king-sized bed; there is
more than room for you to sleep in it, kiddo.”

He shakes his head, not moving.

“Jay.”

“I failed you. You needed me to help
and I was too thcared,” he says thickly.

“I know. We can work on that. Come.”
I don’t have it in me to use power, but I pitch my voice deep and
he comes over to the bed with tears rolling down his face. I’m sore
and drained, but I reach out a hand and pull his thumb from his
mouth. It comes out slowly, scabbed and tender
to even look at. “We’re in a hotel?”

“I mugged mean
people in the park for money,” he whispers, trembling. “I didn’t
know what elthe to do.”

“Mean people.”

“Muggerth. The bad kind,” he adds
quickly, pulling his thumb free and shoving it back into his mouth.

“There is a good kind of mugger?”

“Thometimeth,” he mumbles, a little
more himself at my smile. “Honcho, I –.”

“It’ll be okay, Jay. I screwed up.
That’s not your fault.”

“But –.”

“It’s. Not.”

He blinks, eyes wide, then just nods
and pulls his thumb free of his mouth with an effort. “I thtill –
you needed a way back and I couldn’t –.” He bites into his
lower lip. “I’m thorry, tho thorry,” he whispers, repeating
himself thickly a few times.

“I know. I am, too. I knew you were
afraid, but –.” I sigh. “The people of the town were dead long
before I was able to call you, Jay. That’s not your fault at all,
okay?”

Jay manages a nod at that, then reaches
into his pocket with his right hand and pulls out his cell phone. The
casing is battered, the screen shattered in a dozen places and he
hands it over to me wordlessly.

A small, terrible part of me wants to
laugh, but I force it back. “Okay. Okay. We’ll work on that. I
need to sit up now, if you could?”

He helps me; that I ask and need it
says a lot, but neither of us talk about it. I gesture and he crawls
into the bed, on the covers in clothing: he’s not human, and
removing clothing reveals that to any human. He’s remembering
lessons even as he curls up into the hug I offer and just trembles
with silent tears. I find I have some left as well, for a town and my
own mistakes, and many other things besides.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”